IBM tops Cloud provider report

Australian ICT research firm, Longhaus, has dubbed IBM as the most trusted infrastructure-as-a-service Cloud provider in its new report on the Cloud market.

The vendor also took out top spot in last year’s Cloud provider report. Longhaus managing director, Peter Carr, said in a statement that IBM was an “exemplar” of a Cloud provider for enterprise customers with no minimum commitment and support for a variety of billing models.

“IBM’s smart Cloud enterprise is established in six Cloud data centres globally, including two onshore Australian centres, enabling clients to run workloads across any centre of choice,” he said.

Cloud providers Wipro, Datacom, Emantra and Fujitsu rounded out the top five.

Longhaus also gave a rising star award to Darwin based provider, Area9, which has grown quickly as a direct result of the National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout.

“With the arrival of dual network providers the business is now rapidly expanding,” said Carr.

“Area9 has a predominant Northern Australia focus including the Northern Territory and Northern Queensland but it could potentially deliver footprint capability into South East Asia.”

The report also found that while the Australian Cloud market was maturing, 30 per cent of providers experienced a service outage in the past 12 months.

Longhaus senior research director, Scott Stewart, said in a statement that adequate scale also remains elusive in the local market which is making it difficult for many providers to keep pace. “For example, 43 per cent of providers are demanding minimum terms from their clients.

One trend noted in the report was business-as-a-service; for example, where an airline pays its Cloud provider on for each suitcase processed through the entire baggage handling system.

“This is game-changing and takes the challenge of consumption-based pricing to a whole new level,” Stewart said. "It epitomises the true transition from operational to capital expense in IT "

Another trend in the report is the identification of a new market where pure-play infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon are enabling a pool of non-Cloud professional services companies including KPMG, Accenture and Deloitte to now deliver Cloud services.

“This will add a completely new dimension to the category and place market-leader challenges on the incumbents. It means ‘watch out IBM, Wipro, Fujitsu, CSC and others, your competitive landscape is rapidly shifting ground.”’

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